


In nature’s infinite book of secrecy, a little can I read

by middlemarch



Category: A Discovery of Witches (TV), All Souls Trilogy - Deborah Harkness
Genre: Angst, Domestic, F/M, Family, Fertility Issues, Haunted Houses, Historians, Late Night Conversations, Mother-Son Relationship, Pajamas & Sleepwear, Romance, Scents & Smells, Sharing a Bed, Vampires, Wine, Witches, before Sophie arrives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-24
Updated: 2019-08-24
Packaged: 2020-09-25 09:29:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20374531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: Her power attracted him, yes, and her undeniable bright beauty but it was her mind that he loved. Even when it meant she scolded him like, well, not a schoolboy, but a grad student who hadn't done his research properly.





	In nature’s infinite book of secrecy, a little can I read

The trip from Sept-Tours to Madison had been taxing, more so on Diana. They’d flown and driven, dealt with Sarah’s suspicion and Em’s solicitousness, and finally been settled down in the attic room Em called “the guest suite” without any hint of irony. Matthew thought of what Ysabeau would say if she saw it, the iron-framed bed simply old, not an antique, the softly faded quilts made by Bishop witches over centuries. There was a jumble of glasses on the window-sills, green and cobalt, bubbled with age, filled with dried flowers, acorn caps, a jay’s feather, and braided rag rugs on irregular floor-boards. The ceiling was pitched steeply, the chimney set at one end. He imagined the rooms Diana had been given at his home and would have winced at the comparison, except that her face had relaxed the moment they’d climbed the stairs. Tension he should have seen in her dropped away and if she was not the woman he’d met at the Bodleian, she was herself again in some intrinsic way. Her eyes shone like summer, her hair was a silky, bright tumble around her face. If he ever confided a quarter of his musings to Hamish, the daemon would be on the floor, convulsed with laughter. His mother would be aghast, for all that she’d accepted Diana into the family. Marthe would only smile, happy in his happiness.

He and Diana got ready for bed quickly. She was tired enough he didn’t interrupt her with a kiss and waited to embrace her when they were under the covers. The sheets were not linen, not any particular thread count, but they’d been used for years, laundered with lavender and dried in the fresh air. Diana wore matching pajamas in Madison, not the tee-shirts and leggings he’d seen before; they were made of cotton, sprigged with rosebuds and trimmed in tatted lace. She’d peeked under the pillow and found them neatly folded. Em’s work, he’d thought, until Diana picked up the jacket and muttered _Sarah_, grinning to herself. She settled herself in the bed, turning on her side so he could fit himself behind her, his hand on her belly where the pajama top most cooperatively gave way. She was warm, as she always was, and his body reacted to hers as it always did but he was able to keep his desire for her banked. He kissed the back of her neck and breathed her in, smelling flax and white clover, the sleepy scent of beeswax. He stroked her skin softly, simply enjoying her. She sighed and he laid his palm against her, beneath her belly-button, just above the crest of her hips. 

“Your mother told me I could never give you a child,” Diana said after a moment. She said it to the flickering candle, to the round, grey river-stones of the chimney-piece, to the jay’s feather. He could not see her face beyond the curve of her cheek. “Is she right?”

“I think so,” Matthew replied, letting himself hear the words. “I don’t think I can get you pregnant.”

“Are you sorry about it? Ysabeau told me to make me stay away from you, I believe,” Diana said. “It didn’t work. I wanted you too much to think of anything else.”

“I’m not sorry for myself. I’m sorry about you, _ma caille_,” he said.

“You don’t want a child then,” she said.

“I’ve had a child. Children. Lucas, the ones Blanca lost before, one was a girl, she never cried, so small, _pichona_,” he said, remembering their faces.

“Her name was Pichona?” Diana asked.

“No, it means little, in Occitan. She was so little,” he said. Blanca had wept at the birth, not the way she did when Lucas came next, plump and strong, dark like Matthew.

“I’ve had children and I’ve sired vampires. I’ve been a father. I **am** a father. I should have been more honest with you, I should have told you being my mate meant you would never be a mother,” he said. He felt the weight of the sin, the grief; he’d not wanted to pay attention to it so he hadn’t. He’d focused on Ashmole 782 and how he craved Diana, on danger and fear and whether she was prey. The Covenant and his mother’s narrowed eyes. This glass of wine and the next, always red, always with the faint tang of blood. He hadn’t thought what his love would take from her until she said something. And now it was not vague, not any longer. It was Diana’s eyes shining as she told him, her belly growing round and hard, feeling the baby kick; a newborn at her breast, the sweet, soothing smell of her milk, of clouts soiled with baby shit, Diana exhausted, blissful, laughing, casting spells as she awoke, as she sang lullabies. Holding the child in his arms, their child, a witch with a vampire for a father, Diana’s sunny curls, his own dark green eyes.

“I should have told you, asked you,” he repeated. “It was wrong not to speak of it before.”

“It’s too late now?” Diana asked.

“Too late for our mating to end in anything other than death,” he said flatly. “Yours or mine or ours.”

“That’s all right,” Diana replied, shifting so that she could look at him. She gave him a reassuring smile and somehow the house creaked kindly, in agreement with her.

“What? Christ, Diana, I just told you you’ll never have a child—and that I knew, that I could have said something and didn’t.”

“Well, first of all, you’re wrong. Also, second and third of all. You’ve gotten a lot wrong, Matthew, is what I’m trying to say.” She was all affectionate confidence, almost patronizing. If Baldwin had heard her, he would have crowed over it and offered her a glass of the temperamental Grenache he favored.

“You’re frowning, right here,” she said, tapping the corner of his mouth and then tracing his brow bone above his eyes. “You don’t believe me.”

“No. I don’t understand you,” he said.

“First then. You cannot say never, for there’s never been a mating between a vampire and witch since the Covenant and there are no reliable records extant prior to that,” she said, sounding every inch the historian. “There’s no data, only what your mother said. And pardon me, but I don’t think she was operating from a place of complete sincerity. It’s not a stretch to say she has a significant bias.”

“You think she’s wrong?” Matthew asked. If Ysabeau were wrong, would he want Diana to conceive? It was a different question, one without a clear answer. He supposed she’d be asking it soon enough.

“I think Ysabeau doesn’t know everything, least of all about what we are capable of together, you and I. When we are not fighting to stay alive. Secondly, I do not need to carry a baby to have a child. There are always children to be taken in, who need a home, parents. I was a child like that. Sarah and Em are my aunts **and** my mothers. That one was pretty obvious but maybe siring vampires muddies the waters about adoption, the emphasis on sharing blood, I don’t know.” She said it so matter-of-factly, so charmingly, he couldn’t help laughing a little.

“Third, while you could perhaps have mentioned that you had some concerns about our mutual, shall we say, collaborative fertility, in the face of the Congregation trying to fucking destroy us, Satu, Peter Knox, my wild magic…I can understand how it wasn’t at the forefront of your mind. You’re a vampire, not a god. Being extremely old doesn’t mean you know everything,” Diana said, letting her hand drop to cup his cheek. “Though you don’t look a day over forty.”

“I should look thirty-seven,” he retorted.

“Oh well. None of us are perfectly happy with our appearance, are we?” she teased.

“Are you done? This has been the oddest critique I’ve ever received for failing my beloved,” Matthew said.

“But you haven’t failed me. I never asked you. I didn’t care about having a baby. I only wanted, I only loved you, Matthew,” Diana said.

“You don’t want to have a baby? You’re so sure?”

“I’m not dead-set against it. I don’t want it right now, when everything is so uncertain, when we are so new…we haven’t even consummated the mating. Isn’t that so?” Diana said.

“Yes,” he said.

“So, there’s time. Maybe I will not live as long as a vampire, but witches are not humans. My magic is irregular, unpredictable. I don’t see why we wouldn’t have the chance, many chances, to have a child together in the future,” she said.

“You are enough for me,” Matthew said firmly. “You alone, _mon coeur_.”

“And you’re enough for me. Now that you’ve brought it up though, I like the idea of your baby,” Diana said. He heard the truth in her voice, smelled its green fragrance.

“Our baby,” Matthew corrected. Saying it aloud made it real. One day, he might hold her close and feel two hearts beating. Perhaps that was something he could allow himself to desire, nearly as much as the witch in his arms.

“A witch for a mother and a vampire father…d’you think we might have a daemon?” Diana asked, sounding sleepy and content, untroubled by the question she’d posed, though every other creature Matthew knew would be horrified by it. Well, not Marthe and not Hamish, but everyone else.

“I suppose we’ll see,” he said, kissing her on the forehead. “Go to sleep. Maybe you’ll find the answer in your dreams.”

“Our dreams,” she said, pulling him closer. He let himself doze off. It was good to be together. The house settled around them and the candle went out, without Matthew having to spare a breath.

**Author's Note:**

> I got pretty stuck on the moment when Ysabeau tells Diana she won't have children with Matthew, especially since I know she is dead wrong. I decided to think about it within the tropey goodness of the hand-on-the-belly caress. Matthew is his usual angsty self and Diana reverts to historian for a while before embracing her untapped witchy powers. I feel like this occurs before Sophie and Nathaniel arrive; given this story, Diana must have an I told you so moment with Matthew shortly after the daemons show up.
> 
> The title is from Shakespeare.


End file.
